Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
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The Rigveda's Word for Like Is Also Its Word for No
The Rigveda builds thousands of its images with a particle that also means 'not'. Nothing in the spelling, the accent or the grammar of the word separates the two. Only where it stands in the line tells you whether the poet is comparing or denying.
The Guest Who Never Leaves: Hospitality and the Stranger in the Rig Veda
The Rig Veda has a word for guest. It uses it forty-four times, and in all but two of those the guest is not a person at all: it is the fire on the household hearth. Follow that oddity and a whole Bronze Age system for handling strangers comes into view.
Seven Cups, Seven Jobs: The Org Chart Buried in the Rig Veda
Two Rigvedic hymns invite a god to drink, one stanza at a time, from six differently owned cups. Each cup belongs to a different job title. Buried in the liturgy is the oldest surviving description of a specialist work team, and its lopsided arithmetic gives away who wrote it.
Who Has Ever Seen Him? The Rig Veda's Own Unbelievers
Three verses into a hymn of praise, the Rig Veda stops and quotes somebody saying the god is not real. The line was memorised, syllable by syllable, for three thousand years by people who did not believe it. This is what happens next.
A Hymn to Gruel: What the Rigveda Actually Ate
The Rigveda contains one hymn addressed not to a god but to food itself, and it ends up praising porridge. Around it sits a food vocabulary with barley, ghee and honey everywhere, meat in three verses, and no word at all for rice, wheat or salt.
Man Overboard: The Rig Veda's Shipwreck and the Sea That Should Not Be There
A man is abandoned in open water and carried home in a ship with a hundred oars. The Rig Veda tells this story in fourteen hymns, from a world with no coastline. What its poets actually knew about the sea turns out to be a harder question than either side of the old argument admits.
Carpentered Young Again: What the Rigveda Says When a Body Breaks
The Rigveda's poets describe damaged human bodies with the vocabulary of the workshop: fitted, fashioned, set flowing again. Behind that habit sits a fixed formula, the blind and the lame, that three different gods are credited with undoing.
Ille Loquitur: Two Centuries of Getting the Rigveda Into European Languages
Europe's first Veda was a Jesuit forgery Voltaire owned. The English Rigveda most people read today was finished in 1896 by a translator who hid two verses in Latin, and it dominates the internet for one reason: the copyright expired.
The Beast With a Hand: The Rig Veda's Missing Tiger and the Animals Its Poets Could Not Name
Search the whole Rig Veda for the word tiger and you get nothing. Search for lion and you get fifteen verses. The elephant appears twice, and only as 'the wild beast with a hand.' The pattern is an accidental archive of what its poets had actually seen.
The Syllable Clock: How Meter Dates the Rigveda From Within
A famous Rigvedic line does not scan, until you read it the way it was first sung. The story of how Oldenberg and E. V. Arnold turned syllable counting into a clock for the Rigveda's hidden internal chronology.